Dear Dr. King:
In 1951, long before you made your “I have a dream” speech, the great poet Langston Hughes wrote the following poem, called “Harlem”:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes
And the great playwright Lorraine Hansberry, borrowing the title from that poem, wrote a play called “Raisin in the Sun.” This was in 1959, also before that speech most people associate with your legacy.
The play was about a black family’s experiences in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood as they attempt to “better” themselves with an insurance payout from the death of the father. They planned to buy their “dream” home in a white neighborhood, but a white representative of the neighborhood they intended to move to, made a generous offer to buy them out. He wished to avoid neighborhood tensions over integration.
The family decides to not give up their dream and eventually moved to the neighborhood. That’s where the play ends. However, the story being based on events from Hansberry’s life, we know how the story ended. Not good…
Lorraine Hansberry
You sir, took up this same mantle, and used your exceptional gifts and talents to try to reach the minds and hearts of those that couldn’t see that indelible truth: That we’re all in this muck together whether we like it or not. So we best figure out how to make it work, or mutual destruction is assured.
Well we haven’t made it work, yet.
Hughes’ Harlem went from disenfranchised straight to gentrified, and Hansberry’s Chicago remains a raisin in the sun, one of the most violent and racially-divided cities in the country. And, the America you sacrificed yourself to uplift? Well, strides have been made, but we’ve still got a long ass way to go.
When I was a much younger man, I regret to say, I didn’t appreciate you.
I was raised by revolutionaries with a much different mindset. I held the concept of self-defense in higher regard than self-sacrifice. The intentionally disenfranchised desperately appealing to the better angels of those enfranchised by our deplorable state was just humiliating beyond tolerance to me. I wanted no parts of it.
Dreaming is done in the bed, while despair and hopelessness is murdering my friends and family in the streets. And when we dare to protest the injustices that exacerbate our condition, we’re subject to the same by those who come in the guise of justice. We’re told we’ll be vindicated once we untether ourselves from our self-inflicted victimhood.
Why would I, why would anyone in their right mind, willingly capitulate before this foulness? Why would anyone purposely put themselves in harm’s way with only a faint hope that their sacrifice might awaken some sense of civility and compassion in the hearts and minds of people who have proven, time and time again, to be fairly heartless and utterly unresponsive to such gestures? A power structure that has historically only responded to and understood force? WHY?
Martin Luther King Jr.
But, as I got older, I began to see you and your works in a different light You were playing chess, not checkers.
What I misunderstood to be capitulation I now recognize as a form of spiritual confrontation, calling their spirits to task. What I misconstrued to be passive, I see now was a sign of strength beyond measure, the discipline to use your opponent’s aggressiveness against him, a judo of the soul. What I interpreted as an appeal for sympathy, or for pity, was actually an invocation, an appeal to that great mystical energy that flows within all of us, that unites us regardless of our superficial differences. Something we all share no matter how we worship, and even if we don’t worship at all.
This energy is not readily accessible. Sometimes we need guidance to realize it, a voice to guide us to it, a human of vision, of faith, to help us believe in it, to make the unbelievable believable, to trust what we inherently have always known to be true: That we are one!
You were that voice, sir!
You were in touch with this spirit, gave it a face and a voice. Like few others in history have been able to do, you were able, not to make us dream, but to truly awaken us, ALL of US, to the possibilities, to our greatest potential, if only we’d hold on to that vision.
You deserve every honor bestowed upon you even if that was all you had accomplished in your brief time here. But you did that and so much more, and I, and every American, every person, owes you a debt of gratitude for it. If not in South Dakota, your bust belongs on the Mt. Rushmore in every American’s heart.
Thank you Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
And Happy Birthday!
We Love You and we miss you very much!! The dream may be deferred but thank god it’s not interred. Those of us who honor what you died for will, in our own unique ways, keep on pushing ’til we reach the promised land.
Baye